Paul Schiff Berman is Dean and Foundation Professor of Law at the Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law at Arizona State University. His scholarship focuses on the intersection of international law, conflict of laws, cyberspace law, and the cultural analysis of law.  Before arriving at ASU, Dean Berman was the Jesse Root Professor of Law at the University of Connecticut School of Law. For the 2006-07 academic year, Dean Berman was a Visiting Professor at Princeton University in the Program in Law and Public Affairs. He has also served on the Organizing Committee of the Association for the Study of Law, Culture, and the Humanities.

Dean Berman earned his A.B., summa cum laude, from Princeton University in 1988 and his J.D. in 1995 from New York University School of Law, where he served as Managing Editor of the NYU Law Review and received the University Graduation Prize for the graduating law student with the highest cumulative grade point average. He has served as law clerk to then Chief Judge Harry T. Edwards, of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, and for Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, of the United States Supreme Court. Prior to entering law school, Dean Berman was a professional theater director in New York City and Artistic Director of Spin Theater. He was also Administrative Director of The Wooster Group and of Richard Foreman's Ontological-Hysteric Theatre at St. Mark's Church.

His recent work, which discusses the multiple effects of globalization on legal systems, includes: The New Legal Pluralism, 5 Ann. Rev. of L. & Soc. Sci. 225 (2009); Global Legal Pluralism, 80 S. Cal. L. Rev. 1155 (2007); A Pluralist Approach to International Law, 32 Yale J. Int’l L. 301 (2007); Seeing Beyond the Limits of International Law (reviewing Jack L. Goldsmith & Eric A. Posner, The Limits of International Law), 84 Tex. L. Rev. 1265 (2006); Towards a Cosmopolitan Vision of Conflict of Laws: Redefining Governmental Interests in a Global Era, 153 U. Pa. L. Rev. 1819 (2005); From International Law to Law and Globalization, 43 Colum. J. Transnat'l L. 485 (2005); and The Globalization of Jurisdiction, 151 U. Pa. L. Rev. 311 (2002). He is also the author (with Patricia L. Bellia, Brett Frischmann, and David G. Post) of Cyberlaw: Problems of Policy and Jurisprudence in the Information Age (West Pub.) and the editor of two volumes of essays, The Globalization of International Law and Law and Society Approaches to Cyberspace (Ashgate Pub.).  His monograph entitled Law Beyond Borders: Jurisprudence for a Hybrid World will be published in 2011 by Cambridge Univ. Press. 

Laura A. Dickinson joined the law faculty in 2008 as a professor and the faculty director of the Center for Law and Global Affairs. Her work focuses on human rights, national security, foreign affairs privatization, and qualitative empirical approaches to international law. Professor Dickinson’s current work-in-progress is a monograph entitled, Outsourcing War and Peace, to be published by Yale University Press. The book examines the increasing privatization of military, security, and foreign aid functions of government, considers the impact of this trend on core public values, and outlines mechanism for protecting these values in an era of privatization.

Prior to her appointment to ASU, Professor Dickinson was on faculty at the University of Connecticut School of Law, where she taught from 2001 to 2008, and she was a Visiting Research Scholar and Visiting Professor in the Law and Public Affairs Program at Princeton University in 2006-2007. She served as a senior policy adviser to Harold Hongju Koh, Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor at the U.S. Department of State, and is a former law clerk to U.S. Supreme Court Justices Harry A. Blackmun and Stephen G. Breyer, and to Judge Dorothy Nelson of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. 

Professor Dickinson is a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a member of the Executive Council of the American Society of International Law, and co-organizer of a Collaborative Research Network on Empirical Approaches to International Human Rights Law, convened under the auspices of the Law & Society Association.

Presidential Professor of Law
Professor of Middle Eastern Law and Politics

Professor Mallat joined the faculty of the University of Utah S.J. Quinney College of Law as Professor of Middle Eastern Law and Politics in 2007. He was named Presidential Professor in 2009, and served between 2008 and 2010 as Senior Legal Advisor to the Global Justice Project: Iraq. He also holds the EU Jean Monnet Chair of Law at Saint Joseph's University in Lebanon. He has held research and teaching positions in the US at Princeton University, Yale Law School, the University of Virginia Law School, the Library of Congress, University of California Boalt Hall School of Law, in Europe at the London University’s School of Oriental and African Studies, the University of Lyon, and in Lebanon at Saint Joseph's University and the Islamic University. In the Spring of 2011, he will be teaching at Harvard law school as the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques Visiting Professor of Islamic Legal Studies.

As a legal practitioner and consultant Professor Mallat helped establish the Middle East regional office of Amnesty International in Beirut in 1999, for which his office serves as legal counsel. He has litigated several international criminal law cases, and advises governments, corporations and individuals in Middle Eastern and international law. He is the Daily Star law page editor, and is a frequent op-ed contributor in newspapers ranging from the Nahar (Lebanon) to the New York Times.

Professor Mallat teaches Middle Eastern and European Union laws at the Law School. He is presently teaching a course on the Law and Politics of the Middle East in the Honors college.